Posted tagged ‘desperate man’

He was an ex-Army man and looked very active and fit, but as I chatted to him I discovered that life was in fact terrible for him.

His wife was suffering from severe mental illness and within the last week had walked on to the local motorway to try and kill herself. The husband admitted he was at the end of his tether. Because of her dangerous and unpredictable behaviour he was getting hardly any sleep and didn’t know where to turn. He had tried to get her into secure accommodation, but with no success.

He seemed in a hopeless predicament and He confirmed to me that this was indeed the case.

I picked up a little booklet we have for clients, called “Finding Hope”. I said: “even although you may not be a religious person, this is an encouraging booklet because it offers hope. He flicked through it and said: “yes, that looks good – I’ll take it”. The first pages begin: “If life is hard, if your whole world is broken, if it is hard to keep going………………………where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth” Psalm 121:1-2. Let this God of the Bible bring you hope”.

I went on to tell him that a comprehensive study of the different religions in the world identified the Christian religion as the only one that offered hope to its followers. He told me his wife liked reading, so I also give him another booklet called: “Thought and Prayers For Troubled Times”. He looked through it and said: “yes, I think she’ll read that.”

Later, I chatted to a guy with a major, painful knee problem requiring surgery. I told him of several cases I personally knew of where guys had been healed of knee problems after a short prayer. Despite me encouraging him to try it for himself, he said quite firmly: “no thanks!”. I said: “what do you have to lose – it’s only 30 seconds of your time?” All to no avail, so off he went with his pain and damaged knee.